Slobodan Milosevic Faces Justice

February 13, 2002

No longer can it be said that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia puts on trial only junior officers and other mere spear carriers accused of crimes in the Balkans' civil wars.

On Tuesday, as big a marquee name as the prosecutor could have landed stood before the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, for trial. Slobodan Milosevic is the first head of state to be held accountable before an international court on charges of committing crimes against humanity, including genocide, while he was the president of Yugoslavia.

The tribunal is the first international criminal court since the end of World War II, when Nazi and Japanese leaders were prosecuted for genocidal crimes.

Another reason for the landmark nature of the proceeding is that Mr. Milosevic is the first head of state being tried for offenses committed on his own soil. In the future, perhaps national leaders wedded to policies of ethnic cleansing will think twice before carrying them out.

The crimes for which Mr. Milosevic is charged took place during the 1990s. He waged war against Slovenia and Croatia in a futile attempt to keep Yugoslavia intact, and then helped Bosnian Serbs try to carve out a Serbian republic after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence. Finally, in 1999, Mr. Milosevic, his domain shrinking, masterminded an ethnic cleansing campaign to drive Kosovar Albanians out of the Serbian province of Kosovo.

An estimated 300,000 people lost their lives during the bloody decade, and more than a million people were driven from their homes.

Prosecutors will have to directly tie Mr. Milosevic to the crimes, but there apparently will be no shortage of witnesses to help them. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.

The work of tribunal should not end with the Milosevic verdict. Other notorious figures -- Serbs, Croatians and Bosnian Muslims -- have been indicted by the tribunal, which was created by the United Nations Security Council in 1993. The two most infamous characters still on the loose are Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Ratko Mladic. Surely NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia are capable of arresting him.

Justice must prevail if the wounds in the former republics of the Yugoslav federation are to heal.